There is no longer a question of whether working towards sustainability needs to become the mainstream focus of local and global leaders, but rather how to face the challenge of making this happen. The leadership of many individuals towards a similar goal on a collective scale is needed.

In our globalised world, innovation for sustainability is based on people's ability to think together and to co-operate across sectors, nations and cultures. This means building committed teams of leaders, both within and beyond organisations. Different organisational cultures need to be integrated into joint initiatives and collaboration fostered between diverse stakeholders.

Creating tangible results and enhancing collective responsibility for change will increasingly become part of daily business practices, irrespective of whether responsible supply chains, innovative technology for climate adaptation, stakeholder engagement for water resource management or sustainable city development is being created.

What makes this different from the long-standing discussion on leadership?

It is the composition of what is required: together we need to reach a delicate balance between life-enhancing collective action and iterative collective learning as a cornerstone of innovation. Individually we need to combine our growth of personal maturity with our capacity to lead structural change.

Hence we cannot build individual leadership capacity without simultaneously building our capacity for collective leadership. This includes collective action and dialogic input into the creation of a future that many can own. It is the aspect of collectivity that adds a new dimension to our understanding of leadership for sustainability.

What is the conceptual challenge?

Characteristics of leadership most often refer to the individual, and this is important, as we need to develop certain capacities to be able to lead collectively. But there is far less clarity about how these individual capacities can bring forth collective action.

There are no complete answers yet, so we need to consider this a learning journey. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest looking into the following:

Integrating the inner and the outer journey

We need to travel an inner (personal) path and an outer (collective action) path. Both paths are intertwined, with mindfulness and our awareness of being interconnected in the world preparing us for the outer path of leading structural change in a collaborative way. Underlying both paths are essentially human capacities, such as the capacity to create, collaborate, reflect, organise, build and bring forth the world collectively. This is important: we may not need to learn something entirely anew, but rather bring elements together that have been otherwise fragmented. We can learn from Ray Anderson how insight translates into innovative change, if a person has the power to follow-through on a vision.

Understanding the patterns that work

Human progress needs individual maturity and ethical know-how as much as effective methods for improved co-operation, if we intend to create opportunities out of crises. In future, the joint capacity of leaders to become catalysts for collective action will count more and more. While personal insight is crucial, this does not automatically translate into more fruitful collective action. There are uncounted examples where an individual's efforts have clashed with existing structures and patterns that do not further sustainability. We need to become aware of the factors that support collective action. If the implementation of a mainstream sustainability standard for green coffee can bring together multinational companies, NGOs, producers and several governments into a lasting co-operation, we can learn why this worked and how the lessons could be transferred into other areas.

Learning to learn faster

The future resilience of global, societal and local systems requires better and faster adaptivity, hence not necessarily better steering, but more effective collective learning mechanisms. With climate change, resource scarcity, social imbalances and the crisis of financial systems we are realising that our future depends on action that is based on dialogue and co-operation between different stakeholders. Our capacity to facilitate collective learning at all levels of society thus becomes the most crucial factor for a sustainable future. A company like Nike may have adopted its strategic change as a result of hard learning, but part of this learning is the insight that they needed to create an internal structure that enables them to learn faster in collaboration with their stakeholders.

How to move forward?

We need to understand the patterns that enable collective leadership for sustainability, within and across institutions: what helps companies become joint leaders (as we would wish for in the Lead initiative of the global compact? What enables cities, networks or even states to become leaders for sustainable development? What makes a group of committed inner-institutional or cross-institutional actors successful in leading structural change?

We can move forward when we unearth the composition of factors that enable individuals to lead for sustainability, enhance the cohesion of a group of collaborating actors for sustainability and inspire large groups of people to act in favour of the common good.